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The Other One-Third of the Globe

ben finneyUniversity of Hawai‘i

The Pacific ocean has been called the largest single feature onthe globe because it occupies nearly one-third of the earth’s

surface, more than all the land around the world that rises abovethe level of the sea. How does one approach history in thisimmense body of water? The most common way has been un-abashedly Eurocentric. Geographer Oscar Spate, for example,opens his three-volume history of the Pacific by declaring that“strictly speaking, there was no such thing as ‘the Pacific’ until in1520–21 Fernão de Magalhãis, better known as Magellan, traversedthe huge expanse of waters which then received its name.” ThePacific is a European artifact, says Spate. In its full extent it wasunknown to humanity, including its most widely traveled inhabi-tants, the Polynesians, until seafarers from another ocean beganto sail across this mighty sea and then to chart it. Spate’s own aim,as he says in his preface, was to “explicate the process by whichthe greatest blank on the world map became a nexus of globalcommercial and strategic relations.”1

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Journal of World History, Vol. 5, No. 2© 1994 by University of Hawai‘i Press

1 Oscar H. K. Spate, The Spanish Lake (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1979), pp. ix, 1. Spate’s other two volumes, also published by the University ofMinnesota Press, are Monopolists and Freebooters (1983) and Paradise Found andLost (1988). In this last volume, Spate does consider the Pacific island populations,but his focus is on their transformations following from their enmeshment in theemerging global commercial and strategic web. Similarly, although Walter Mc-Dougall, in his recent Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific fromMagellan to MacArthur (New York: Basic Books, 1993), does feature Hawai‘i andKa‘ahumanu, its dowager queen of the early nineteenth century, he primarilytreats the powers and personalities of the nations along the rim of the northernPacific.

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In telling that story. Spate covers only three out of the five hun-dred or so centuries of human experience in the Pacific, and hefeatures a parade of European explorers, adventurers, settlers,and colonial administrators. In contrast, my approach to historyin the Pacific is unabashedly anthropological, in the sense that Iam primarily interested in how the first people to enter thePacific managed to explore so much of the ocean and to colonizeall the habitable lands they found there, how the societies theyfounded differentiated and evolved over the millennia, and howthe descendants of those people are faring in today’s global soci-ety. This is my way of sketching the most interesting story of thePacific: that of its pioneering inhabitants and their descendants.This is one ocean people have really lived in, not simply sailedacross.2

Colonizing an Oceanic World

The trend of the original human expansion into the Pacific waseastward from Asia, though the process was radically discontinu-ous. New Guinea was settled early, starting some 50,000 or moreyears ago, but the colonization of islands farther out into the oceandid not begin until some 3,500 years ago.

The usual geographic division of the Pacific island world intoMelanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia ignores this crucial discon-tinuity and its linguistic, cultural, and biological consequences.3A better way to divide the Pacific, one that makes sense of bothmigrational sequence and sequelae, is to follow archaeologistRoger Green’s distinction between Near Oceania and RemoteOceania (Fig. 1).4 Near Oceania consists of New Guinea and adja-cent islands, which together with the islands of Indonesia form a

2 My perspective is infor med by some thirty years’ residence on various Pacificislands, as well as by experimental canoe voyages in Polynesian waters and byfield projects on how Tahitians, Papua New Guineans, and other islanders havebeen coping with their inclusion in the world-system. Still, my view remains thatof an outsider.

3 For better or worse, we have been stuck with this tripartite division of thePacific islands ever since the French explorer J. S. C. Dumont d’Urville so dividedthe region in an address to the Geographical Society of Paris: Voyage de la CorvetteL’Astrolabe . . . pendant les années 1826, 1827, 1828, 1829, 5 vols. (Paris: J. Tastu, 1830),2:614–16.

4 Roger Green, “Peopling of the Pacific: A Series of Adaptive Steps, or Punc-tuated Evolution,” presented at Section H, 57th Annual Meeting of Australian andNew Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, 24 August 1987.

Finney: The Other One-Third of the Globe 275

chain of intervisible, or nearly intervisible, land masses separatedby only short ocean gaps. Remote Oceania consists of a largenumber of archipelagos and islands beyond Near Oceania. This iswhere the open Pacific begins: distances between the islands andarchipelagos of Remote Oceania can reach hundreds of miles, andin a few cases thousands of miles.

Near Oceania was made readily accessible to people from Asiaduring the last glaciation when so much water was taken up bythe ice sheets that at times sea levels were 100 or more metersbelow where they stand today. This joined the main islands ofIndonesia to the Asian mainland to make a long peninsular exten-sion of Asia that geologists call Sunda. The drop in sea level alsoconnected New Guinea, Australia, and Tasmania, plus their conti-nental shelves, to form a greater continent that geologists callSahul, and it narrowed the sea distances between Sunda andSahul (Fig. 2). To take advantage of this opportunity to settle newlands glimpsed to the east, migrants needed only some rudimen-

figure 1. Oceania, showing the conventional geographical division intoMelanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, and the more prehistorically sig-nificant division into Near Oceania and Remote Oceania.


tary form of watercraft—perhaps rafts of bamboo or wood, ordugout canoes. With the right combination of wind and current,plus perhaps some paddling, adventurous groups made it acrossthe glacially narrowed gaps between Sunda and its offshoreislands and Sahul. Nonetheless, however simple the technology,reaching Sahul was a major step in humankind’s spread over theglobe. A clustering of sites in Australia that have been radiocar-bon-dated in the range of 30,ooo-plus years b.p., along with othersites from New Guinea and Australia dated by other means atbetween 40,000 and 60,000 years b.p., indicates that Sahul was set-tled well back in the Pleistocene. It thus represented the first step

figure 2. Sunda and Sahul at the height of the last glaciation, when thesea level was more than 100 meters below that of today.


in human expansion beyond the linked African and Eurasian con-tinents that had nurtured the species.5

This early movement did not extend far into the Pacific. Thedescendants of these pioneers went on to settle the islands immedi-ately offshore from Sahul as far east as the Solomons, but theyapparently never crossed from there to Remote Oceania. Tens ofthousands of years passed before this gap was bridged and the set-tlement of the truly oceanic islands of the Pacific was begun. Theseafarers who colonized Remote Oceania are commonly called Aus-tronesians, a label originally coined to stand for all the related lan-guages that spread across the Pacific and Indian Oceans from theirpoint of origin, thought to lie in southern China. From what is nowFujian province, they are thought to have spread to Taiwan (wherethe aboriginal inhabitants still speak Austronesian languages)between 4000 and 3000 b.c.e., and then south into the Philippinesand eastern Indonesia. While some moved west to occupy the restof Indonesia and the adjacent stretches of the coast of mainlandSoutheast Asia, others sailed east along the north coast of NewGuinea, where at around 1500 b.c.e. they show up in the archaeolog-ical record of the Bismarck Archipelago. Within a few centuriesthese Austronesian voyagers moved east into Remote Oceania,island hopping the length of Melanesia to the archipelagos of Fiji,Tonga, and Samoa. In time, ancestral Polynesian culture developedin this mid-Pacific location from its Austronesian roots, and fromthere recognizably Polynesian seafarers continued eastward to theCooks, Societies, and Marquesas at the center of East Polynesia.Some of their descendants then dispersed to the islands beyond—sailing over thousands of miles of blue water to reach the islandsthat form the points of the Polynesian triangle: Hawai‘i, Rapa Nui,and Aotearoa, or if you prefer, the Sandwich Islands, Easter Island,and New Zealand (Fig. 3).6

5 Joseph B. Birdsell, “The Recalibration of a Paradigm for the First Peopling ofGreater Australia,” in Sunda and Sahul, ed. J. Alien, J. Golson, and Rhys Jones(New York: Academic Press, 1977), pp. 113–67. Some suggest that evidence of wide-spread fires in pollen cores may indicate a human presence in Australia as early as140,000 years ago. John Chappell, “Late Pleistocene Coasts and Human Migrationsin the Austral Region,” in A Community of Culture: The People and Prehistory ofthe Pacific, ed. Matthew Spriggs et al. (Canberra: Department of Prehistory, Aus-tralian National University, 1993), pp. 43–48.

6 Patrick V. Kirch and Terry L. Hunt, eds. Archaeology of the Lapita CulturalComplex: A Critical Review, Research Report 5 (Seattle: Thomas Burke MemorialWashington State Museum, 1988); Jesse Jennings, ed. The Prehistory of Polynesia(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979).


The ocean-going canoe was the vehicle that Austronesianspeakers employed to expand across the South Pacific and then tofind and settle every habitable island in Polynesia, a vast triangu-lar region equivalent in size to much of Europe and Asia com-bined. Austronesian canoe voyagers also colonized that region ofRemote Oceania east of the Philippines and north of New Guinea,known as Micronesia because of the small size of the islandsthere. Some migrants evidently crossed to western Micronesia

figure 3. Main Austronesian migrations into the Pacific: (1) from the Bis-marcks to the mid-Pacific archipelagos of Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa; (2) the“homeland” of the Polynesians, now known as West Polynesia; (3) fromWest Polynesia to central East Polynesia; (4) from central East Polynesiato Hawai‘i, Rapa Nui, and Aotearoa; (5) from the Philippines to the west-ern edge of Micronesia; (6) from the main migration sequence north toMicronesia and then west across the region.


directly from the Philippines; other branched off the main Aus-tronesian migrational trail and sailed north across the Line to theatolls of eastern Micronesia. Still other Austronesian voyagersfrom Indonesia sailed clear across the Indian Ocean, or around itsnorthern periphery, to become the first people to colonize thegreat island of Madagascar, where the national language, Mala-gasy, is recognizably Austronesian. This dispersion of Austrone-sian speakers reached from a south China–Southeast Asian heart-land west almost to Africa and east to within a few thousandmiles of the coast of the Americas, a span of 225 degrees of longi-tude. It made the Austronesian family of languages the most wide-spread on the globe—until Western European seafarers begantheir own expansion, thereby spreading Indo-European languagesbeyond Eurasia.

Austronesian seafarers may have been initially attracted toNew Guinea and adjacent islands by opportunities to trade withthe local inhabitants. Upon sailing east past the Solomon Islands,they made a discovery that must have amazed and delighted them:all the islands to the east were uninhabited. This circumstanceinvited successive generations to keep heading east, and thennorth and south, until they finally ran out of islands. This Aus-tronesian expansion to previously uninhabited oceanic islandsinvolved crucial adaptations in four areas: nautics, subsistence,social structure, and world view.

To build a successful ocean-going sailing craft, some meansmust be found to counteract the overturning force of the windupon the sails. Europeans widened the beam of their vessels andadded ballast to gain the necessary stability. Austronesians ineffect greatly expanded the beam of their slim canoe hulls byextending a float to one or both sides to make an outrigger canoe,or by joining two hulls to make a double canoe. Because of thedouble canoe’s greater stability and capacity, the Austronesiansare believed to have favored it for moving across the South Pacificand then expanding to the many islands of Polynesia. Of course,these migrants also had to become expert sailors and navigators.Moving eastward across the tropical South Pacific meant sailingagainst the direction from which the trade winds blow. Ratherthan attempting to sail into the trades, these seafarers apparentlylearned to wait for periodic westerly wind shifts and then to usethese favorable winds to probe to the east. To conduct their voy-ages of exploration and colonization, and to maintain communica-tion between scattered outposts, they had to be able to orient


themselves precisely and find their way from island to island.They did so by means of naked-eye observations of the stars, sun,ocean swells, birds, and other natural phenomena, and by inge-nious methods of dead reckoning, and by observing telltale cloudformations, distinctive variations in the swell pattern, or the day-time ranging of land-nesting birds to detect land before it couldbe seen directly.7

These seafarers did not live solely off the wild food resourcesof the sea and the islands they found. Fishermen and food gather-ers could not have flourished in any great numbers in RemoteOceania. To be sure, the oceanic islands and their offshore watersoffered a wealth of fish and bird life upon which bands of colo-nists could initially feast, but they furnished little in the way ofwild vegetable foods to sustain large settled populations. Thesesailors therefore had to be expert farmers as well. They also hadto develop means for carrying on their canoes a wide range ofplants, such as the breadfruit, taro, yam (Dioscorea), and banana,as well as the domesticated pig, dog, and chicken, in order to pro-vide the subsistence base needed for successful colonization.8

Such features of Austronesian social structure as the principlethat the senior first-born male of the lineage descended mostdirectly from the founding ancestor was the chief also seem tohave been adaptive for oceanic expansion. Small groups of hierar-chically organized kinsmen possessed ready-made cohesion andleadership that must have been crucial for the success of hazard-ous missions of exploration and colonization. Furthermore, pri-mogeniture encouraged migration by the younger sons of a chiefwho had no hope of succession to leadership at home. Instead ofrebellion or fratricide, they had a more constructive outlet fortheir ambitions. They could create a new chiefdom of their ownby recruiting followers, building a voyaging canoe, and then set-ting sail into unknown seas to find and settle a new island.9

Above all, the way these seafarers viewed their world undoubt-

7 Ben Finney, Voyage of Rediscovery (Berkeley: University of California Press,1994).

8 Douglas E. Yen, “Agriculture and the Colonization of the Pacific Islands,” inPacific Production Systems: Approaches to Economic Prehistory, ed. D. E. Yen andJ. M. J. Mummery (Canberra: Department of Prehistory, Australian National Uni-versity, 1990), pp. 258–77.

9 Ben Finney, “Voyagers into Ocean Space,” in Interstellar Migration and theHuman Experience, ed. Ben Finney and Eric Jones (Berkeley: University of Califor-nia Press, 1985), pp. 164–79.


edly encouraged them to seek new lands far out into the ocean.Instead of envisioning the world as a series of continents incon-veniently separated by great stretches of water (as I was more orless taught in school), experience had shown these seafarers thatthe world was covered with water through which bits of solid landpoked. Sail in any direction and you will find land. Sail to the east,out into the open ocean where only you have the technology andskills to go, and you will find uninhabited lands. This was theirunbeatable formula for oceanic expansion—until they reached theeasternmost oceanic islands of Hawai‘i, the Marquesas, andRapa Nui. Beyond them was only empty ocean until the alreadyoccupied Americas.

Diversity and Adaptation

Part of human diversity in the Pacific must stem from this dif-ferential settlement of Near and Remote Oceania. For example,consider the contrast between the short, stocky highlanders ofNew Guinea who speak languages unrelated to Austronesian andlive in societies led by upwardly mobile “big men,” and the tall,lighter skinned Polynesians who speak Austronesian languagesand live in societies ruled by hereditary chiefs. This contrastseems more likely to be a function of these two very differentmigrations into the Pacific than the result of local differentiationfrom a common source. But between these extremes the picture isdecidedly mixed. Austronesian speakers are found here and therealong the coast of New Guinea and on some of the other islands ofNear Oceania, and on all the Melanesian islands of RemoteOceania. Some of these Austronesian speakers are as dark assome of their non–Austronesian-speaking neighbors, and socialorganizations are highly variable. These circumstances mustreflect a complex history of mixing between “old Melanesians”and more recent migrant populations.

Well before Austronesian seafarers entered the Pacific, thedescendants of the first settlers of Sahul had already undergoneradical transformations. Some of the diversity of the aboriginesof New Guinea, Australia, and Tasmania may have reflected sepa-rate migrations to Sahul from various Southeast Asian sources.Still, many of the linguistic, cultural, and physical differencesamong the descendants of the first Sahulians must have comefrom their wide dispersion over such a vast and varied continent,and the later separation of Tasmania and New Guinea from Aus-


tralia as sea levels rose in the Holocene. Dispersion to a widerange of environments, followed by long-term separation, wouldhave allowed ample opportunity for the founder effect, randomdrift, and evolutionary adaptation to work on biological and cul-tural forms. Consider the differences among the scattered hunt-ers and gatherers adapted to the temperate forests of Tasmania,the bands of Aborigines attuned to a wandering life in the dryinterior of Australia, and the dense, sedentary populations ofneolithic farmers in the mountainous valleys of the New Guineainterior.

Because of the relatively recent occupation of Polynesia by asingle migratory movement and the region’s comparative isola-tion until the coming of Europeans, the individual island andarchipelago societies there are much more homogeneous in lan-guage and culture than those of Micronesia and, above all,Melanesia. Nonetheless, the Polynesians’ adaptation to a widevariety of island types—coral atolls barely above sea level, lushvolcanic islands, and a few comparatively huge continentalchunks—provides a fascinating panorama of variations from acommon ancestral theme.

Some islands of Polynesia were apparently too small, dry, orbarren to sustain permanent settlement. For example, archaeo-logical remains indicate that some dry equatorial atolls, as well asa few minuscule high islands scattered throughout the region,once hosted small groups of Polynesians who either died out onthese so-called “mystery islands” or set sail in search of morefruitful lands. The better watered coral atolls of the northernCook Islands and the Tuamotu archipelago sustained permanentsettlements, although the limited size and agricultural potentialof most meant that the population of individual islands typicallynumbered only a few hundred. High, volcanic islands with well-watered and fertile soil on which the full range of Polynesiancrops could be grown sustained populations numbering anywherefrom a few thousand on the smaller islands to many tens of thou-sands on the larger islands.

The impact of these neolithic farmer-fishermen on the hithertouninhabited islands of the tropical Pacific was considerable. Onisland after island the extinction of numerous bird species, partic-ularly flightless ones, coincides with the arrival of Polynesian col-onists. The clearing of forests for agriculture and the introduc-tion of the rat, with its predilection for feasting upon the eggs ofground-nesting species, may in some cases have been more harm-


ful than direct human predation. Agricultural clearing, particu-larly for slash-and-burn farming, deforested the slopes of the highislands and also rearranged the landforms. Soil washed downfrom slopes stripped of forest cover filled in embayments andextended the narrow coastal plains. Often, however, this was tothe advantage of the settlers, who thereby gained more flat landfor intensive agriculture, including the development of irrigatedtaro cultivation.10

Temperate Aotearoa provided a unique environmental chal-lenge for Polynesian colonists, whose descendants are now knownas the Mäori. There was no lack of land or rain; the well-watered,heavily forested islands must have seemed unbelievably huge topeople used to the comparatively tiny islands of the tropicalPacific. The problem was that Aotearoa was too cold for the tropi-cal crops of the Polynesians. At the northern end of the northern-most island of Aotearoa, taro and to some extent bananas could begrown, but these plants shriveled as the colonists probed south-ward. To the rescue came the sweet potato, a South Americantuber that had somehow spread to Polynesia. According to Mäoritradition, it was introduced to Aotearoa sometime after originalsettlement. This new tuber proved to be much more resistant tothe cold than the crops the colonists had been trying to grow,allowing them to push their settlements farther south.11

Once the growing island populations began to noticeablyaffect the environment and test the limits of each island’s re-sources, did the people begin to practice measures designed toprotect their environment and limit their own numbers? Since thepre-European systems were shattered long before such questionswere posed, it is perhaps not surprising that they are difficult toanswer. Certainly, there is evidence of a wealth of seasonal and adhoc prohibitions placed upon exploiting particular species. Andthere were some ingenious practices, such as the custom of theunited population of the twin atolls of Manihiki and Rakahanga in

10 Atholl Anderson, Prodigious Birds: Moas and Moa Hunting in PrehistoricNew Zealand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); David W. Steadman,“Extinction of Birds in East Polynesia: A Review of the Record, and Comparisonswith Other Pacific Islands Groups,” Journal of Archaeological Science 16(1989): 177–205; Patrick Kirch, “The Impact of Prehistoric Polynesians on the Hawaiian Eco-system,” Pacific Science 36 (1982): 1–14.

11 Janet Davidson, The Prehistory of New Zealand (Auckland: Longman Paul,1984); Douglas E. Yen, The Sweet Potato and Oceania, Bulletin 236 (Honolulu:Bernice P. Bishop Museum, 1974).


the Northern Cooks to live alternately on one and then the otherisland, always keeping one in fallow so that fish stocks and vegeta-tion could recover. Similarly, there is fragmentary evidenceof various methods of population control. These ranged fromseverely regulating births by abortion, infanticide, and variousmarital arrangements to actually driving weaker clans into thesea, or at least pressuring them to take to their canoes and leavethe island to the rest of the people. Whether these measuresreflected a conscious conservation ethic, or whether they werecalculated for individual family, clan, or tribal survival, the factremains that on island after island the Polynesians were able tobuild thriving, self-sufficient societies.12

One spectacular case stands out, however, where any mea-sures of conservation or population control failed utterly. RapaNui is the loneliest outpost of Polynesia, lying some 1,500 milesfrom the nearest permanently inhabited islands in the Tuamotusand some 2,300 miles from the Chilean coast. Those Polynesianswho first colonized Rapa Nui around 1,500 years ago apparentlyfound it thickly covered by tall palm trees. In clearing land forfarming and in cutting trees to build houses and canoes, as well asrollers and scaffolding to move and erect their giant stone statues,the people of Rapa Nui progressively desiccated their island sothat crops could be grown only in small areas sheltered fromthe omnipresent wind. The famine-stricken people fought oneanother, overthrew the great statues and the socioreligious orderthey represented, and dropped in number from an estimated8,000–10,000 to 2,000–3,000. Ironically, in “crashing” their island,the people of Rapa Nui also eliminated any possibility of escape,for there was not enough wood left to build voyaging canoes.13

One theme that has fascinated students of Polynesia is howsocieties founded by small bands of seafarers developed intolarge and highly stratified chiefdoms with complex cultures.Anthropologists see, or think they see, on atolls and small islandssocieties that essentially conserve, or at least strongly reflect, the

12 Peter H. Buck, The Ethnology of Manihiki-Rakahanga, Bulletin 99 (Hono-lulu: Bernice P. Bishop Museum, 1932); Raymond Firth, We the Tikopia (London:George Alien and Unwin, 1936), pp. 414–15; James T. Tanner, “Population LimitationToday and in Ancient Polynesia,” Bioscience 25 (1975): 513–16.

13 Patrick C. McCoy, Easter Island Settlement Patterns in the Late Prehistoricand Protohistoric Periods, Bulletin 5 (New York: Easter Island Committee, Interna-tional Fund for Monuments, Inc., 1976); Paul Bahn and John Flenley, Easter Island,Earth Island (London'. Thames and Hudson, 1992).


ancestral social organization carried into Polynesia by the firstexplorers. On these small islands, where the populations typicallynumbered only in the hundreds, the ruling chiefs were not greatlyseparated from the common people. They were regarded as seniorkinsmen, stewards of the land and the bounty of the sea, whoseduty was to look after the people and intercede with the gods andnature on their behalf. This ancestral pattern became trans-formed—some might say warped—on the larger islands and insome archipelagos, where populations expanded into the tens ofthousands and in some cases hundreds of thousands.14

An extreme example was ancient Hawaiian society, one of thelargest and most stratified in all Polynesia. Population estimatesfor the entire archipelago range from a quarter-million to up-wards of a million. An endogamous chiefly class ruled over themass of common people who were generally without direct kin-ship links to their rulers. Within the chiefly class, politicallyastute and militarily skilled men who were not necessarily of thehighest genealogical rank vied for leadership, organizing chief-doms that controlled a district of an island, an entire island, or insome cases several islands. The aggrandizing bent of these ambi-tious chiefs, their control of resources including intensive irriga-tion systems, and their retinues of administrators, priests, sol-diers, and servants of various kinds might seem utterly alien tothe modest chiefdoms of the smaller islands of Polynesia. Yet acase can be made that the class stratification and complexity ofHawaiian society represent a logical, if exaggerated, example ofhow a social system adapted for oceanic exploration and coloniza-tion can be transformed when small colonizing groups grow intogreat populations on large and fertile archipelagos.

Intruders from Another Ocean

The Pacific islanders were not totally isolated from the rest of theworld before their encounter with Europeans. The introduction ofthe sweet potato to eastern Polynesia indicates a maritime con-nection with South America, although at present we do not knowwhether the tuber was carried to Polynesia by South American

14 Irving Goldman, Ancient Polynesian Society (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1970); Marshall Sahlins, Social Stratification in Polynesia (Seattle: AmericanEthnological Society, 1958); Patrick Kirch, The Evolution of Polynesian Chiefdoms(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).


raft voyagers, or whether some intrepid Polynesian seafarers;sailed all the way to South America and then returned to theirislands carrying it with them. Disabled Japanese fishing vesselsmay have occasionally drifted into Polynesian waters in earliertimes, as we know they did in more recent centuries, and way-ward Chinese junks may also have made landfalls on some oce-anic islands. There is some archaeological evidence of continuingcontact between Belau (Palau) on the western edge of Micronesiaand the Philippines, and there was no natural border betweenNew Guinea and the islands of eastern Indonesia that preventedtravel and trade. Nonetheless, the island societies of RemoteOceania remained neolithic outposts that were largely isolatedfrom the outside world until seafarers from another ocean beganto intrude into the Pacific.

Magellan’s voyage across the Pacific marked the beginning ofthe end of this isolation, although the full opening of Oceania tothe outside world took several centuries. The Europeans’ limitedcapability for long-range voyaging and even more limited ambi-tions for exploring for its own sake prolonged the process. Magel-lan and his crew were unprepared for the immensity of thePacific.They had expected to cross it in a matter of weeks.Instead it took them an agonizing three months and twenty daysto sail across a sea that seemed to a stunned chronicler to be “sovast that human mind can scarcely grasp it.”15 Magellan, as wellas most of the other European navigators who followed over thenext two centuries, did not want to explore the Pacific, much lessto settle it as the Austronesians had done. Like the proverbialchicken, the Europeans simply wanted to get to the other side,typically to reach rich Asian ports. The few expeditions that didset out to find fabled islands or the hypothesized Southern Conti-nent of cosmographers did not develop into sustained explorationprograms. Exploration of so vast a region strained European sea-faring technology and abilities. Further, the Spanish and Dutch—the main sea powers active in the Pacific at that time—had morethan enough on their hands with their American and Asian pos-sessions. Officials were understandably hesitant to fund specula-tive exploratory ventures into the South Seas.16

15 Maximilian Transylvanus, in a letter to the cardinal-archbishop of Salzburgwritten in 1522, cited by John Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook (London:Hakluyt Society, 1974), p. 109n.

16 John Beaglehole, The Exploration of the Pacific (London: A. and C. Black,1934).


To be sure, European navigators did bump into Pacific islandshere and there on their passages across the ocean. Only Guam,however, received much sustained attention. Magellan’s landfallproved to be an ideal place to stop on the Manila galleon route,and the Chamorro people there became the first Pacific islandersto suffer systematically from colonial occupation. More typical ofthose first centuries was the situation in Polynesia. Europeanships, including the galleons plying between Mexico and Manila,managed to sail clean through Polynesian waters for two and ahalf centuries without anyone noticing that they were passingthrough an island realm populated by peoples of a common cul-tural heritage. What landfalls were made here and there inPolynesia did not result in the linguistic and cultural inquiriesthat would have led to recognition of the cultural unity of thewidely dispersed Polynesians. Nor did they lead to any sustainedrelations between the Polynesians and the outside world.

All this changed in the late eighteenth century when the rivalsea powers of Britain and France used vastly improved ships, nav-igation methods, and provisioning to send into the Pacific expedi-tion after expedition charged with conducting scientific researchas well as gaining geopolitical advantage. Cook’s three voyagesinto the Pacific stand as monuments to this new approach. Cookdemolished the myth of the Southern Continent and the possibil-ity of easy access to Asia via a northwest passage. Moreover, hecharted the location of one oceanic island after another, laying thegroundwork for the first accurate map of the Pacific. Cook wasthe first to realize the cultural unity and extent of Polynesia, inthe sense that he recognized that the islands within the triangleformed by Hawai‘i, Rapa Nui, and Aotearoa were all inhabited bypeople closely similar in appearance, language, and culture whoformed what he called the “most extensive Nation spread over theface of the earth.”17

Not surprisingly, many islanders do not agree that suchenlightened “discoveries” were necessarily good. A Christmascard I received a few years ago from the Hawaiian Studies Depart-ment at the University of Hawai‘i depicts the faculty and studentsin protest. One of the placards they carried reads “RememberCaptain Cook,” meant in the sense of “Remember Pearl Harbor.”

17 Ben Finney, “Captain James Cook and the European Discovery of Polynesia,”in Maps and Metaphors, ed. Robin Frazer and Hugh Johnston (Vancouver: Univer-sity of British Columbia Press, 1993), pp. 19–34.


They have a point. In addition to introducing previously unknownand devastating diseases. Cook and company made Hawai‘i and somany other islands accessible to the parade of sea captains, whal-ers, missionaries, and colonists who followed, by so accuratelyfixing their locations on the map.

The succession of traders, whalers, plantation owners, miningcompanies, and tourism developers attracted to the region, andthe activities they undertook or stimulated, served to pull thePacific islanders into the world economy in a peripheral, depen-dent status. World-systems theory and its cousin dependency the-ory provide ways for analyzing how this took place. Yet it is alsoobvious that the strategic ambitions of the various core countriesand their Pacific surrogates of Australia and New Zealand weremore often crucial in island takeovers and the events that fol-lowed. For example, consider France’s early grab for the Mar-quesas and Tahiti as points in a French global empire; Germany’stardy rush for Pacific colonies; the late nineteenth-century exten-sion of U.S. “manifest destiny” to Hawai‘i, Samoa, and Guam;Australia’s covering of its northern flank by controlling the east-ern half of the great island of New Guinea; the Pacific-wide clashof American and Japanese empires in World War II; and the sub-sequent use by the United States, Britain, and France of their vari-ous Pacific dependencies as “nuclear playgrounds” to test theirdeadly weapons.18 Whether one wants to emphasize economic orpolitical imperialism, the inevitable result of the voyages ofMagellan, Quiros, Bougainville, Cook, Krusenstern, Wilkes, andother explorers was to bring the Pacific islands and their inhabi-tants into the larger world system, for better or for worse.

The New Pacific

What has happened to the Pacific islanders as a result of theirprogressive entanglement with global society? The picture ismixed according to region, colonial history, resource distribution,and other factors. For lack of space I can only lightly sample,starting with Polynesia.

To begin with, the Polynesian populations were hard hit by

18 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (New York: AcademicPress, 1974); Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in LatinAmerica (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967); Stewart Firth, Nuclear Play-ground (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1987).


imported diseases. For example, in the century that followedCook’s opening of Hawai‘i to the outside world, the number ofHawaiians declined to less than 50,000, a horrendous dropwhether the pre-Cook population was 250,000 or closer to 1 mil-lion, as current revisionists advocate. Even harder hit were thePolynesians living on lonely Rapa Nui at the time of Europeancontact. By 1877, 150 years after Roggeveen first sighted the islandon an Easter Sunday, only around 100 members of the originalpopulation remained. After a slow decline, the population hadplunged precipitously starting in 1862 and 1863 when slave raiderscarried off more than 1,000 people to Peru. Most quickly sickenedand died there, and the handful who were returned after an inter-national outcry brought back smallpox, measles, and various res-piratory diseases that almost succeeded in finishing off those whohad escaped the slave raiders.19

During the nineteenth century, France, Britain, the UnitedStates, Germany, British New Zealand, and Chile took over thevarious Polynesian archipelagos, either through outright annexa-tion or by imposing protectorates of various sorts. White settlerswere most numerous in Hawai‘i and Aotearoa, and the Hawaiiansand Mäori ended up losing most of their lands. They becameminorities on their own islands, forced to compete with the morenumerous descendants of later migrants.

Other Polynesians kept control of most of their lands and haverecently organized independent or quasi-independent nation-states. Because of the lack of local economic opportunities, how-ever, many of them have left their islands. Over one-third of the300,ooo-plus Samoans and more than half of the citizens of thesmaller islands and archipelagos of Tokelau, Niue, and the CookIslands live overseas in New Zealand, Australia, the United States,and even in Europe. According to some analysts, this out-migration has radically “underdeveloped” these islands, turningthem into consumer dependencies disproportionally populated byolder people and young children supported largely by remit-tances sent by the economically active islanders living overseas.20

19 David E. Stannard, Before the Horror: The Population of Hawai‘i on the Eveof Western Contact (Honolulu: Social Science Research Institute, University ofHawai‘i, 1989); Grant McCall, Rapa Nui: Tradition and Survival on Easter Island(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1981), pp. 47–64.

20 Paul Shankman, Migration and Economic Development: The Case of WesternSamoa (Boulder: Westview Press, 1976).


Until recently, the migrant Polynesians may have envied theircousins in Tahiti and the other islands of French Polynesia, anoverseas territory of France, because they did not have to leave tofind well-paying jobs. But their arguably good economic fortunedepended upon a dictated Faustian bargain to let France use theirislands for nuclear testing. Along with the testing came radioac-tive pollution, real or imagined; a heavy military presence; infla-tion; rural-urban flight; and a heavy import-dependency, extend-ing even to basic foodstuffs. Now, with the post-Cold War end oftesting, the annual “atomic rent” of around US$1 billion thatFrance was pouring into the islands is drying up, leaving FrenchPolynesia bankrupt. Some local politicians have demanded thatFrance resume testing or keep subsidizing local standards of liv-ing, which until recently rivaled those of the metropole. Otherssay that this may be the time for a clean break from France.21

World War II had a greater impact on Micronesia than on anyother part of the Pacific, and the strategic concerns of the victori-ous United States have continued to dominate all but the tinynations of Nauru and Kiribati at the extreme southeast corner ofthe region. On the eve of the war Japan controlled much of theregion. As soon as hostilities began Japan took over the fewislands there that it did not already rule. Three years later, the vic-torious United States elected to hold on to the former Japanesepossessions of the Marshalls, Carolines, and Northern Marianas(which in World War I Japan had taken from Germany which hadbought them from Spain). This arrangement was sanctified by theUnited Nations as a “strategic trust.”

Implementing this strategic trust has involved, among otherthings, using Bikini and Eniwitok atolls in the Northern Mar-shalls to test nuclear weapons early in the Cold War; a dislocatingextension of U.S. economic and social programs starting in theKennedy administration; and a marked reluctance to allow anypolitical evolution that would result in full independence of thewhole or any of its parts. The people of the Northern Marianaseventually voted to be a U.S. Commonwealth like Puerto Rico, andthe Marianas have since become a tourist center for the nearbyJapanese. The people of the Marshalls and Carolines have becomequasi-independent, giving the United States strategic privileges in

21 Bernard Poirine, Tahiti: Stratégic pour l’après nucléaire (Arue, Tahiti, FrenchPolynesia: Bernard Poirine, 1992); Ben Finney, “Nuclear Hostages,” in From Sea toSpace (Palmerston North, New Zealand: Massey University, 1992), pp. 66–97.


return for a handsome settlement. However, the settlement isalready beginning to run out, leaving them import-dependent andwithout an economic base.22

In Melanesia, the highlands of the great island of New Guineaoffer an intriguing glimpse of what might have happened if thePacific peoples had been able to enjoy some of the fruits of theoutside world without its devastating diseases, rapacious traders,and intrusive colonial administrators. The New Guinea highlandsremained truly a blank upon the world map until the 1930s. At thattime gold prospectors, missionaries, and government patrol offi-cers found dense populations of stone-age farmers living in fertilevalleys and foothills along the island’s mountainous spine. Someevidence suggests, however, that these seemingly untouched peo-ple may not have been totally isolated, and that the population ofmore than 1 million was probably considerably larger than itwould have been if Europeans had stayed in the Atlantic.

Hunters and gatherers first penetrated the New Guinea high-lands tens of thousands of years ago. Indirect evidence of agricul-ture there—probably the cultivation of irrigated taro—may goback as far as 9,000–10,000 years. According to an intriguinghypothesis, however, the population was nowhere near as large asthe number found living there in the 1930s—until the sweet potatowas introduced in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The tuberapparently did not travel to New Guinea across the Pacific islandby island; rather, it came from Spanish America, probably via Ibe-ria and the Indian Ocean, to the spice-rich islands immediately tothe west of New Guinea, and from there over local trade routes tothe highlands. There the farmers found this new crop much bettersuited to the cool conditions of the highlands than the lowlandtropical crops they had been growing. It gave greater yields, and itcould be grown higher up in the mountains than taro, bananas,and other lowland staples. The availability of this new food led toa marked population expansion, analogous to what occurredwhen another South American crop reached Ireland.23

Because the colonial frontier was so late in reaching the high-

22 P. F. Kluge, The Edge of Paradise: America in Micronesia (New York: RandomHouse, 1991); Gary Smith, Micronesia: Decolonisation in the Trust Territory of thePacific Islands (Canberra: Peace Studies Centre, Australian National University,1991).

23 James B. Watson, “The Significance of a Recent Ecological Change in theCentral Highlands of New Guinea,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 74 (1965):

438–50.


lands, the people there were spared some of the worst effects ofcontact with the West experienced by islanders in earlier centu-ries. For example, during World War II when highlanders on theeastern side of the island began to die from an epidemic of shi-gella dysentery spread by Japanese troops, the speedy introduc-tion of village sanitation measures and the airlifting of tons of sul-faguanidine tablets stopped the epidemic. Otherwise, mortalityrates might have reached 25% or more, as occurred in earlier cen-turies when untreated scourges were visited upon the more acces-sible islanders. Soon after the war coffee was introduced as ahigh-value cash crop in the eastern highlands. This enabled theinhabitants, many of whom had been born in the Stone Age, toearn good money from their own plantations. Since then, they andtheir successors have greatly expanded their holdings and havebought out the Australian coffee plantations. The industry is nowin the hands of highlands capitalists controlling multimillion-dol-lar enterprises. Not surprisingly, these beneficiaries of the world-system express little regret about their brief and relatively benigncolonial experience.24

The peoples of New Guinea were never united into states oreven large chiefdoms. Instead, they were politically divided into amultitude of separate village, clan, and tribal units and belongedto hundreds of distinct language communities. The late nine-teenth-century extension of colonialism to the island caused it tobe divided among three powers. The Dutch took over the westernhalf of the island, the Germans the northeast quarter (plus adja-cent islands, including Bougainville in the adjacent SolomonIslands chain), and the British and Australians the southeastquarter. In the early 1960s Indonesia made the western half of theisland into an Indonesian province now called Irian Jaya, to thedismay of local elites whom the Dutch had been hastily preparingto administer an independent West New Guinea. In 1975, the Aus-tralian-administered eastern half (the Germans had surrendered

24 Ben Finney, Bigmen and Business: Entrepreneurship and Economic Growthin the New Guinea Highlands (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1973); BenFinney, Business Development in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, ResearchReport 16 (Honolulu: Pacific Islands Development Program, East-West Center,1987). Some Marxist commentators, while searching for a “Melanesian socialism”in the highlands, had initially excoriated these indigenous capitalists as “big peas-ants” or even as “kulaks.” More recently, some of these scholars have evenaccepted that the entrepreneurs actually did a fairly good job of articulating localeconomies to the world-system. Mike Donaldson and Kenneth Good, ArticulatedAgricultural Development: Traditionalist and Capitalist Agricultures in Papua NewGuinea (Aldershot, England: Gower Publishing Group, 1988).


their quarter to Australia in World War I) became the independentnation of Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guinea initially con-founded those pessimists who had predicted that such a heteroge-neous nation without any indigenous tradition of large politieswould immediately fall apart. Now, however, the country is undersiege by regional secessionists driven by the unequal distributionof the country’s fabulous mineral wealth as well as by its radicalcultural diversity. For example, revolutionaries from the offshoreisland of Bougainville became furious that the mineral revenuefrom their island was used mostly to finance the national govern-ment. In response, they shut down the world’s largest open-pitcopper mine, located there, and are now fighting the central gov-ernment for their independence.25

The great island of New Caledonia has rich nickel deposits.These, along with France’s ambitions to retain a chain of territo-ries spread around the globe, have helped to keep that islandFrench despite the desire of many of its native Melanesian inhabi-tants to form the independent nation of Kanaky. The presence of alarge colonial French population in New Caledonia, along with asizable number of Polynesians brought in to work in the nickelindustry, has further complicated New Caledonia’s political evo-lution. Similarly, in Fiji the presence of an ethnically South Asianmajority, descended from workers brought in to grow and processsugarcane, has made democratic political evolution problematic.For almost two decades there was some degree of cooperationbetween ethnically Fijian and South Asian politicians. Recently,however, military coups by the Fijian-dominated army have led toa Fiji-for-Fijians regime. The new regime is being watched withinterest by islanders from other Pacific countries and territorieswith large nonindigenous populations.26

Pacific Basin, Pacific Rim, or Pacific Islands?

During the last decade or so it has become increasingly popularoutside this island world to talk about the “Pacific Basin” or the“Pacific Rim.” This trendy conception is focused not on the ocean

25 Yaw Saffu, “The Bougainville Crisis and Politics in Papua New Guinea,” TheContemporary Pacific 4 (1992): 325–43.

26 Deryck Scarr, Fiji, Politics of Illusion: The Military Coups in Fiji (Ken-sington, Australia: New South Wales University Press, 1988); John Connell, NewCaledonia or Kanaky? The Political History of a French Colony, Pacific ResearchMonograph 16 (Canberra: National Centre for Development Studies, AustralianNational University, 1987).


and its peoples, but rather on the nations around the edge and theincreasing trade between them that is shifting the global econo-my’s center of gravity away from the Atlantic.27 This attitudeturns the ocean in the middle into an immense inconvenience thatadds to shipping time and jet lag. While contemporary travelershurtling from one rim to the other sealed within long metal tubessuffer little in comparison to the starving, scurvy-ridden sailorsof the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many of them cer-tainly wish the ocean was smaller so that they could get on withtheir transoceanic activities, and without so many mind-bogglingchanges of time zones.

Where does this basin/rim conception leave the Pacific islandsand islanders? With the exception of mineral-rich and—tempo-rarily at least—timber-rich New Guinea and a few other well-endowed islands, the Pacific is not all that attractive to rim inves-tors. Similarly, island populations are too small to provide a largemarket and too well off to provide cheap labor, so they do notloom large in basin manufacturing schemes. Thus, at the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) “Pacific Rim Club” forumof presidents and prime ministers held in Seattle in November1993, not a single Pacific island state (save for European-domi-nated New Zealand) was represented, although Papua NewGuinea was elected to membership at the meeting.28 What aboutthe rest of the Pacific islands? Are they fated to be rest and recrea-tion stops for the increasingly affluent rimmers, while their peo-ples either migrate to the rim or stay to live off remittances, for-eign aid, and financial crumbs from the tourist tables?

Rather than become mired in such “rimonomic-speak,” Iwould prefer to close this essay by highlighting some Pacificisland developments that reflect how the islanders themselves areattempting to shape their lives so that they may thrive and notjust survive in the global system into which they have been thrust.By no means have all Pacific islanders passively accepted their“peripheralization” to the world-system or the “underdevelop-ment” process that formulation implies. The coffee capitalists ofthe Papua New Guinea highlands provide a case in point. In a way,so do those Samoans, Tongans, and other Polynesians who moved

27 Arif Dirlik, “The Asia-Pacific Idea: Reality and Representation in the Inven-tion of a Regional Structure,” Journal of World History 3 (1992): 55–79.

28 Thomas Friedman, "Leaders Seek Strong Pacific Community,” New YorkTimes, 21 November 1993:1,14.


from their home islands to the margins of the Pacific. Instead oflooking at this outmigration as a desperate search for money thatcripples the home islands by stripping them of their young andable citizens, think of it in terms of the continuation of a structureof the longue durée in Austronesian history. The Polynesianmigration, put on hold when the oceanic islands became filled,has now resumed thanks to the incorporation of these islands intothe world-system. Large Samoan communities can be found inAuckland, Sydney, Honolulu, San Francisco, and other majorcities. Substantial amounts of money, goods, and people flowback and forth between these overseas outposts and the home-land (Fig. 4). Tongan emigration, though on a somewhat smallerscale, seems more targeted (Fig. 5). Extended families based onTonga are famous for training their talented members and plac-ing them in good jobs around the world. The Samoans, Tongans,and smaller migrating Polynesian groups are on their way tobecoming transnational populations.29

Even in Hawai‘i and Aotearoa, where the indigenous Polyne-sians were first swamped by emigrants from Europe, America,and Asia and then submerged in alien polities, the people are nowstirring. The Hawaiians and Mäori have embarked on vigorouscultural renaissance movements. They are relearning their lan-guages, reviving their dance and art forms, and reconstructing theirancient voyaging canoes and sailing them over the routes bywhich their islands were first settled. Even more, they are vigorouslycontesting colonial arrangements and seeking a return oftheir “stolen lands,” as well as separate status as sovereign entit-ies within their current polities. Some are agitating for total inde-pendence.30

Although some Pacific islanders are accused of being moreconcerned with dreaming about an idealized past than with fac-ing up to the realities of today’s world, my reading is that all or

29 Geoffrey Hayes, “Migration, Metascience, and Development Policy in IslandPolynesia,” The Contemporary Pacific 3 (1991); 1–58; Robert Franco, “Hawaii’sChanging Role in Samoan Movement: Fa‘afetai and Mahalo,” Pacific Studies (inpress); Fernand Braudel, “Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée,” Annales:Economies, sociétés, civilizations 13 (1958): 725–53.

30 Donna Awatere, Maori Sovereignty (Auckland: Broadsheet Press, 1984);Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty inHawai‘i (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1993); Michael K. Dudley andKeoni Kealoha Agard, A Call for Hawaiian Sovereignty (Honolulu: Na Kane o kaMalo Press, 1990); Ben Finney, “Myth, Experiment, and the Reinvention of Polyne-sian Voyaging,” American Anthropologist 92 (1991): 383–404.


virtually all of them want to participate in the wider world, but ontheir own terms rather than on those set by outsiders. How arethey to work out satisfactory ways of living, particularly on thesmaller islands anchored far out to sea?

Those who first tested the waters of the Pacific had to developa new technology to sail where no one had gone before, to dis-cover and settle the islands they found scattered over the ocean,and to develop thriving societies on the fertile but bioticallyimpoverished oceanic islands on which they settled. Those nowleading the renaissance in Polynesian voyaging are betting thatthe innovative approach to oceanic exploration and living pio-neered by their ancestors may provide inspiration for theirfuture.

Almost twenty years ago the Höküle‘a, a reconstruction of anancient double-hulled voyaging canoe, was launched in Hawai‘i. Ithas since been sailed on a series of long, traditionally navigatedvoyages throughout Polynesia, combining experimental research

figure 4. Samoan communities from Australia to California, 1980–90 (U.S.census years), 1981–91 (British Commonwealth census years). (From RobertFranco, “Hawai’s Changing Role in Samoan Movement: Fa‘afetai andMahalo,” Pacific Studies [in press].)


into the ancient migrations with cultural revival. This initiativehas stimulated people throughout the islands to reconstruct theirown voyaging canoes and to think about the technology, skill, andcourage that went into the founding of their widespread nation.Nainoa Thompson, the Hawaiian navigator of Höküle‘a, relearnedte art of guiding a canoe by naked-eye observations of the stars,ocean swells, and other clues provided by nature. Under his lead-ership, this movement now seeks to employ this voyaging experi-ence to get Polynesian youths to consider their problematic futureand not just their distinguished past.

Hawaiian students have begun to analyze in scientific as wellas cultural terms the original Polynesian expansion into thePacific and the colonization of the islands. With that backgroundin mind, they next want to tackle the problems of fashioning a sus-tainable lifestyle for the islands in today’s crowded, intercon-nected, and fast changing world. The Pacific needs more suchinitiatives.

figure 5. Tongan communities from Australia to California, 1980–90 (U.S.census years), 1981–91 (British Commonwealth census years). (FromFranco, “Hawaii’s Changing Role in Samoan Movement.”)

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